Evidence-based mental health promotion resource - health.vic.gov.au

114 Evidence-based mental health promotion resourceAppendix A: Review methodsIntroductionThe preparation and publication of research and development reviews is commonlyundertaken to develop knowledge and improve practice. Systematic reviews are reviewsthat are conducted with particular approaches that seek to minimise bias and error inthe synthesis of a body of literature to draw conclusions and make recommendations.They are characterised by methods of systematic appraisal and summary accordingto an explicit and reproducible method, and may have narrow or broad criteria forthe inclusion of interventions. Study designs may be based on decisions that quasiexperimentalstudies are the minimum acceptable standard of evidence but, asdiscussed in this section, such studies may not be available in the field of healthpromotion or may not be ethically or technically feasible.The reviews of evidence here are informed by systematic review methods, but our aim hasbeen to collate relevant studies that have used a broad range of methods, so as to developa practitioner friendly resource. For this reason, we have made a considerable effort totrack down published and unpublished studies. The resource is intended to be accessiblein style, to make research available to practitioners, service users and policy makers.Reviews of any form of health promotion evidence are complex. The search termsused in search engines are not necessarily compatible with health promotion language.This problem is illustrated by Taub’s (2001) attempt to conduct a systematic review ofhealth education literature, which was thwarted by the breadth of the topic and searchlimitations, and because health promotion is a poorly indexed concept. Reviews ofmental health promotion interventions are thus also likely to be problematic, necessitatingresourceful search strategies to overcome the limitations of search indexes.In response to these limitations, we employed a range of strategies, including:• focusing initially on three specific areas of mental health promotion: social isolation,freedom from discrimination and violence, and access to economic resources• identifying systematic reviews of particular significance to the mental healthpromotion workforce• using an international expert committee to inform the review• actively exploring fields of relevance to mental health promotion as the evidencebased emerged.The following section outlines the method used to search for mental health promotioninterventions. Some material included in this section is relatively technical butnecessary to explain the approaches used to develop the resource and to describesome of the difficulties encountered.